Sometimes, it was mindboggling just how much the world had changed. The system, strange monsters and general societal collapse, those were things I could somewhat comprehend and wrap my head around, even the magic I commanded was something I was learning more and more about each day. But then something came out of the left field and smacked me in the head, giving me a headache with the enormity of it while making me question if the world continued to make sense. Or functioned according to the laws of physics as I understood them, at least to a point. But, given the whole ‘magic’ thing, it was obvious that my understanding, or rather the understanding of the entire world before the change, had been seriously limited. Parts had been missing and maybe this particular bit was another of those missing bits. Or it was just plain madness and the world didn’t even try to make sense and work according to consistent laws.

In this case, the headache-inducing realisation was comprehension of the Charland’s scale and what it meant, or maybe would mean, for the rest of the world. Walking around the industrial park, without getting into the Charland’s proper, gave us a rectangle of roughly fourteen hundred metres on one side and about eight hundred on the other. Quite big but nothing completely out of this world, walking around it took about an hour if one wasn’t in a hurry or slowed down by terrain. Normal, reasonable, something I could wrap my head around without getting a serious headache.

That changed when we finished measuring, or rather estimating, the inside dimensions of the Charlands. The space was enlarged by roughly a factor of a hundred, instead of fourteen hundred metres, the length of the Charlands was somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred and forty kilometres with a width to match. That wasn’t the size of an industrial park, that was the size of a small country, and it was largely filled with ruined buildings. Where they came from, I had no idea, nor did the designations we found inside make sense. There were places where it looked almost as if someone had simply taken parts from elsewhere in the Charlands and copy-pasted them into existence without any rhyme or reason.

On more than one occasion I had tried to figure out if I was dreaming, trapped in an illusion or afflicted by some other mental manipulation and the whole thing wasn’t real but no such luck. According to everything I tried, everything Luna could do, the entire thing was real. It made no sense, not by any metric I could come up with, and yet, it seemed to be part of our reality, leaving me with that aforementioned headache and many, many more questions.

For example, how deep into the ground did the stretching go? What about gravity? The additional amount of material might be minuscule on a global scale but I doubted this was the only strange area, conveniently near my home. Sure, one strangely warped area would not affect the planet’s mass, and thus gravity, but if there were hundreds, or maybe thousands such areas? Suddenly, the additional area would start to add up and things might get weird.

Where did the material come from, where did anything come from? We had checked some of the buildings, both those that looked like they fit into what I’d expect from an industrial park, following roads, the numbers on buildings following a predictable pattern, things like that, and those that didn’t. Those that looked like they had been haphazardly thrown into the area by some teenager playing some city-design game and was getting bored, filling the map to make it look less empty. And yet, we had found a few surviving papers and forms in both sorts of buildings, though the vast majority of documents had been burned as one would expect.

The entire thing made so little sense, I was tempted to throw reason out of the window and decide the world had become a video game instead of it being a real world with strange elements thrown in.

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Once we had an idea of the size of the Charland, and still no better way to handle the fire elemental sitting on its Fire Node, I wanted to learn more. One night was spent sending a scrying construct as deeply into the Charland as I could get it, only to learn that the Fire Astral Power, or something else, was getting stronger as the construct got deeper into the area, causing my construct to dissipate roughly twenty kilometres from the centre. At least where the centre would be, if our previous estimations and measurements were correct, the Charlands and the strange spatial warping within them weren’t consistent, making accurate calculations impossible.

Finally, we got a cloudy day and I was able to send scrying constructs into the park during the day. My plans were twofold. One part was to find out if the Charlands became tremendously more dangerous during the day if we wanted to venture deeper into the area, we needed to know what we were getting into. The Charlands might turn into an ocean of fire while the sun was high in the sky, or become deadly in some other manner, maybe due to a greatly increased amount of enemies. Another thing I wanted to find out was whether the expansion remained or changed, as that, too, might become an unforeseen danger. In essence, I wanted to have more information so I could make a properly informed decision about future endeavours.

Well, exploring the Charlands like that, letting a construct made out of darkness flit from shadow to shadow had its own charm. There was no need to be constantly on my guard, the worst thing that could happen to me while exploring like that was that I had to start anew, annoying but ultimately harmless. No risk of death or injury but, obviously, no chance to gain anything other than information.

In that manner, I learned that there were a few additional enemies around during the daytime but I couldn’t tell whether they were particularly powerful or vicious, merely that there were more of them. The flames I could see on the different beasts might be a little larger and i did notice that there were some much bigger creatures, beasts the size of the Fireshield Tortoise we killed during the first night, that roamed during the day, making me a little leery of exploring the Charlands for extended periods of time. If one of those beasts came across us during the day, it might not matter how well we were holed up, with limited space we could easily get roasted. Hel, even just the sheer weight of numbers might be enough to overwhelm us, if the monsters roaming the area focused on us, the light allowing them to coordinate in ways they couldn’t during the night.

It sounded incredibly risky, though whether the risk was worth it, I wasn’t sure. The EXP and levels I had gained in this area were incredible but that well was mostly dry unless the monsters got extra levels during the day. Or we could start hunting the bigger beasts, those like the Fireshield Tortoise, that way I’d get a few more levels, though it might be hard, depending on their individual abilities.

With that in mind, and knowing that trying to hunt those beasts during the day would be insane, I tried to find out where they holed up for the night, so we could disturb their slumber. Hel, I even tried to find out what they were eating, one of the monsters I noticed was some sort of giant lizard that made me think of a wingless dragon the size of a car. A beast that big had to devour tons of food just to sustain itself but I never saw it eat anything. Nor did I notice any, well, droppings, making the whole situation even weirder than it used to be.

Finally, during one of the rare rainy days, I came across what I considered the epitome of weirdness. Just as I had during all the other cloudy days, I had used the shadows cast by the clouds to explore deeper into the Charlands. Only this time, maybe due to the rain dampening the fires, I managed to get deeper than ever before and there, roughly where I thought the centre of the Charlands would be, I saw a giant crater. It was hundreds of metres across and, even after increasing the altitude of my construct, I couldn’t see its bottom, just a strange, ominous glow radiating out from it, just before the construct dissipated.

I had been after additional information and now, I knew just about everything I could hope for and we needed to make a decision. Hopefully, whatever decision we made would be the right one, as that glow deeply disturbed me.